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April 26, 2016

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Unique prize for ideas that will change the world

THE Hult Prize, established in 2009 with the help of former US President Bill Clinton, has become one of the world’s largest student competitions. For young people, it’s a challenge to produce ideas most likely to change the world. The best idea, announced by Clinton, stands to win US$1 million in start-up capital.

Last year, more than 50,000 university students from 130 countries and regions competed for the prize. The winning idea came from students showed a way forward in dealing with crowded urban spaces and came from Chengchi University in Taiwan.

“It is a unique thing,” said Bertil Hult, founder of EF Education First who bestows the US$1-million seed capital for the prize. “The idea is to get the brightest minds to think about real problems in the real world and to cope with them.”

And there is plenty of issues to choose from. In the past nine years, people taking part in the competition have studied issues like clean water, safe food and even how to bring laptops to children in poverty-stricken areas.

“The results are far beyond my expectation,” Hult said. “Some young people are really smart, and their ideas feed each other to produce even better ideas.”

At the very beginning, the competition was designed to involve only three campuses. Then someone suggested to get the world’s top-ranking business school on board, Hult recalled.

At that time, the competition was limited to the US and a few schools in Europe.

The game-changing point, Hult said, was when former US President Bill Clinton agreed to present the award.

“Bill made the competition really famous,” he said. “It took us one year to get him to agree to get involved after lots of phone calls and due procedures, but that made a huge difference.”

Now, the Hult Prize is announced by the former president himself at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York every year.

The competition has grown so popular that it has expanded across most of the world.

“One major challenge for the competition is to find qualified judges,” Hult said. “Some ideas are avantgarde, and we require talent to understand and to offer help of turning ideas into actions.”

In Asia, nearly 20 people were selected as judges for the competition last year, all of whom were senior executives and academic heavyweights, such as directors of innovation or research at multinational companies or faculties in elite universities.

Besides, the reward money was given out step by step to ensure it is properly used.

Hult is no stranger to innovation. In 1965, when he was still a college student, Hult established EF in order to help Swedish high school students study language and culture in the United Kingdom.

EF now has more than 500 offices and schools in 53 countries and regions, and employs more than 40,000 people, making it one of the world’s leading private education companies that focuses on language learning, educational travel, cultural exchange and academic programs.

Programs of corporate social responsibility are an integral part in EF, and the Hult Prize is just one of them. During his recent stay in Shanghai, Hult witnessed how his staff members have taught English to kids who lost their hearing, a corporate social responsibilities project which has been supported by EF teachers for more than four years.




 

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